The 21st annual conference of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) will be held at University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland, on August 25-29, 2009. The theme is "Environment, Food and Global Health", and the conference will cover the whole field of environmental health. The investigators will have a mix of plenary sessions, some on food-related topics, others on environmental health and environmental health policy, with high-profile speakers, symposia on the latest developments in the field, and parallel sessions, with poster and oral presentations. A special feature of the meeting will be structured opportunities for networking for new researchers, for researchers from less-developed countries, and a series of formal training sessions. ISEE 2009 will bring together researchers representing a wide range of interests. Original research reports, case studies, and workshops will be presented in the areas of air and water quality, reproductive outcomes, climate change, exposure assessment, risk assessment, complex mixtures, children's health, intervention studies, food, community responses to environmental health issues, methods in environmental and spatial epidemiology, including GIS, and much more. Consistent with the tradition of prior ISEE conferences, ISEE 2009 will maintain high scientific standards in the papers and workshops in order to generate lively discussion in these sessions. The International Society for Environmental Epidemiology aims to foster the study of health and the environment. It provides a forum for the discussion of problems unique to the study of health and the environment. Membership is open to environmental epidemiologists and other scientists worldwide. ISEE provides a variety of forums for discussion, critical reviews, collaborations and education issues for environmental exposures and their human health effects. The 2009 conference will aim to facilitate the participation of members from developing countries, and will have workshops specifically aimed at knowledge transfer and developing collaborations for epidemiologists from developing countries.